Today, Heptio, in collaboration with Actapio, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corporation, announces Gimbal, an open source initiative to unify and scale the flow of network traffic into hybrid environments consisting of multiple Kubernetes clusters and traditional infrastructure technologies including OpenStack.

Gimbal removes obstacles for companies looking to adopt Kubernetes in their environments by routing high volume traffic into both Kubernetes clusters and existing solutions like OpenStack that often live side by side in the enterprise infrastructure. This cloud native solution is tailored for the highly dynamic nature of managing Kubernetes workloads, which expensive, existing solutions are not designed to do. By using Gimbal, companies can leverage the agility of cloud native systems to modernize legacy infrastructure, giving them faster time-to-market at reduced cost.

The advantages of Gimbal include:

Cost effectiveness. Gimbal is a software solution that runs on commodity hardware and serves the same function as much more expensive purpose built hardware solutions. This creates a significantly more affordable solution for real world environments.

Simplicity and flexibility. Gimbal scales for multi-team Kubernetes clusters of all sizes with reduced complexity and increased reliability. Being API driven, it integrates easily with legacy and cloud native systems.

Cloud Native first; legacy friendly. Existing solutions were not designed to support dynamic, rapidly scaling cloud native deployments. Gimbal was built from the ground up to seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes and handle dynamic workloads. It also integrates with existing systems to create a unified traffic tier that can span new and old back-end systems.

Multi-cloud ready. Gimbal enables load balancing on any cloud on-premises, on cloud platforms where Kubernetes is deployed, and as a network across multiple clouds. It can serve as an alternative to cloud provided load balancers as a way to ensure that workloads are fully decoupled from the infrastructure they run on.

"We approached Heptio to help us modernize our infrastructure with Kubernetes without ripping out legacy investments in OpenStack and other back-end systems," said Norifumi Matsuya, CEO and President at Actapio. "Application delivery at scale is key to our business. We needed faster service discovery and canary deployment capability that provides instant rollback and performance measurement. Gimbal enables our developers to address these challenges, which at the macro-level helps them increase their productivity and optimize system performance."

"This collaboration demonstrates the full potential of cloud native technologies and open source as a way to not only manage applications, but address broader infrastructure considerations," said Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio. "Kubernetes is a natural starting point, but integrating it fully into the real world is still an evolving story. Systems like Gimbal help to pragmatically bridge existing systems and new cloud native infrastructure like Kubernetes. We have been thrilled to work with Actapio to look more broadly at traffic management."

The Actapio implementation underscores Heptio's business momentum since emerging from stealth in November of 2016. Backed by Accel Partners and Madrona Venture Group, the company saw revenue grow 140 percent from Q4 2017 to Q1 2018 ‒ part of its year over year momentum of onboarding scores of new customers. The company also quadrupled its employee headcount from Q1 2017.

Gimbal is currently in alpha and under active development. Heptio and Actapio look forward to working with the open source community to build a flexible system.